Once again, the picturesque and mountainous region of Carinthia played host to Europe’s biggest bike event in early September. Approximately 110,000 people descended upon the area surrounding Faaker See, turning the tranquil landscape into a tumultuous party of roaring V-Twin engines.

I flew out to shoot the event for Harley-Davidson again this year and as with previous years it turned out to be a very hectic yet amazing experience. I used the Canon C300 exclusively, mostly with the Canon 17-55 EFs lens although I did break out the 70-200 at one point to grab some close shots of the crowds enjoying bands.

The C300 is such a great all-round camera for this kind of work, during the day I configure it with the full monitor rig and a shotgun mic and then when I prefer to be a little less conspicuous I tend to remove the handle and monitor and just run either without a mic at all or with the Rode VideoMic Pro.

Towards the end of each rally I ride pillion in the parade and again the C300’s modular build proves useful as I hang my smallHD DP4 around my neck on a lanyard and just run the camera with it’s handle attached allowing me to shot using many angles that would be impossible using the cameras onboard monitor.

Because I had to fly out to Brasil to shoot another rally for Harley-Davidson soon after returning from Austria this one was edited by Paul Pearson (@pearsonpost) on twitter.

The wonderful, “Wild Blood” by Lovedrug was supplied by The Music Bed.

Today Canon have announced a smaller brother to it’s C300 and C500 cameras in the form of the EOS C100. With retail price of around $6500 or £4,600 in the UK it comes in at around half the price of the the C300 so where have those savings been made and how do the two cameras stack up against each other in terms of features?

I’m basing these initial thoughts on the specifications currently available on Canons website so this post is likely to be updated as more information becomes available.

Here’s the latest video I shot and edited for Harley-Davidson Europe. The location of this rally was Cascais and surrounding areas in Portugal. The flag parade that happens towards the end of the rally (and the end of the video) started out on the famous Estoril race circuit which was a real blast to ride around.

Everything in the above video was shot on the Canon C300 and I made a lot of use of over cranking again this time. It’s a real shame to have to revert to 720p to do that on the C300 but I think the camera still manages to retain a lot of detail and certainly enough for these projects as the required delivery is 720p anyway.

For the flag parade I attached my SmallHD DP4 to a lanyard and help it in front of my whilst using the other hand to position the camera. This all happens on the back of a motorcycle with other bikes everywhere so it was a little bit daunting but worked great.

I only use two lenses throughout the whole shoot, the Canon 17-55 f2.8 IS EFs and the Canon 24-105mm f4 IS L . The 17-55 did more than 80% of the shooting though and I find that lens to be the most practical for this subject as bikes just look great wide!

The only other notable kit was a glide track shooter HD and my Miller Tripod with the later only being used on five of the shots. I make a lot of use of the image stabilisers in the lenses and the warp stabiliser in CS6 so that I rarely have to use a tripod.

If you have any questions about camera settings etc then just shout. These event videos have to be produced immediately after the shoot itself without any time off so I’m going to have a much needed day or two off :)

When working in crowded or bright environments I like using my Canon C300 with the monitor assembly removed but still using the top handle to carry the camera around. If you want to record basic audio in this configuration though you have to use the 3.5mm mic jack on the side using something like a Rode Videomic Pro.

The problem though is that the cold shoe placement on C300’s handle makes the handle unusable when a mic is fitted to it, it ends up looking something like this…

What we really need is the mic to be fitted to the front cold shoe, but that’s a vertical shoe so the mic would be pointing in totally the wrong direction and would just look silly. Something like this mockup I made would be better, I’m sure Rode would produce a much more elegant solution than my feeble hack job though.

That way the handle can still be used and the mic is out of the way above the lens. It would be nice if it was smaller though. Something more compact would be great, maybe even a stereo mic?

So there you go manufacturers, a small shoe mounted mic for the C300 would be really useful, oh and remember where you got the idea when it comes to field testing your wonderful creations! ;)

I’ve had a few people ask if I would consider sharing the Canon EOS C300 Custom Picture Profile / Scene Files I created and used on the video I did for Harley-Davidson in St Topez recently. The picture profile is now available for download if you want to try it out. Just remember this is more of a ‘baked in’ look, see the video below for examples of how it looks, the C300 shots were not colour corrected in this video.

I need to give a shout out to people who’s profiles I tried before creating mine as I leaned a lot from them. Alister Chapman, Abel Cine, Kevin Ritchie and the BBC’s recommendations all helped me to understand what different settings would achieve. Another great resource was Art Adams ‘Stunning Good Looks‘ post about correcting white balance on the C300.

The zip file contains a single preset file which will replace the setting you have in the SD1 position. Make sure you back up your existing SD1 setting first!

Let me know how this works for you. The setting is called PJOY1080 because it’s set up for 1080p shooting. I have another one for 720p but I’m still perfecting that and I’ll share it once I’m happy with it.